Activate Your Fanbase With User-Generated Content

 In the digital era, everyone is a content creator, and that’s great news for marketers. Brands are boosting awareness by encouraging the public to share their customer experiences on platforms like Twitter and Instagram. Just to name a few notable examples, Coca Cola’s “Share a Coke” hashtag marketing campaign asked fans to snap Coke-themed photos of themselves, and Charmin solicits toilet humor from its Twitter followers. But this kind of user-generated content (“UGC”) isn’t limited to social media interactions between a brand its customers. Savvy marketers are starting to mix UGC into their email marketing campaigns — and it’s working. Recent studies have shown that UGC delivers a 73 percent increase in email click-through rates.

UGC is simply content about your brand that is created by your business’s customers or fans, whether that content is photos, videos, product reviews, or testimonials. One obvious benefit of incorporating consumer content into your email marketing is that it saves you time. Instead of having to constantly come up with new content ideas on your own, your customers are the driving creative force.

But the real key to the power and popularity of UGC is that it humanizes your sales pitch. You aren’t the one telling your subscribers how wonderful your products or services are; real customers do it for you. UGC is authentic, and when used as a part of an email marketing campaign, it builds trust in your brand.

One of the best forms of advertisement is a satisfied customer. As amazing as your email content-crafting skills may be, consumers are more interested in what their peers say about your business. In fact, 70 percent of consumers trust peer recommendations and reviews over professionally written content. Zulily takes advantage of this statistic with a “Customer Picks” emails that feature some of their best-selling products, along with a few brief but enthusiastic customer endorsements:

So how can you start integrating UGC into your email marketing? You can put out a call in your newsletter for subscribers to email photos or stories of their experiences with your products or services. Or you can come up with a brand-specific hashtag, ask customers to submit to you via social media, and feature your favorite responses in your next email. You might consider a theme for the submissions that is tied to an upcoming promotion or event.

To celebrate Star Wars Day and promote a Star Wars merchandise sale, Hot Topic asked its customers to submit photos of themselves in Star Wars gear. The best submissions were included in an email photo collage:

Of course a theme isn’t necessary. TeeFury’s emails showcase photos of happy customers wearing the company’s apparel:

To give your subscribers an extra push to submit, you can hold a contest, with a gift certificate or other prize going to the most creative submission. However you go about incorporating customer content into your emails, make sure that you’ve obtained permission from the original creator to use their content and that you’ve articulated exactly how that content will be used.

Once you get the go-ahead, don’t be afraid to experiment with different types of UGC. Photos might work well for one brand, while testimonials work better for another. But if content development is one of your email marketing pain points, then UGC could be the solution.

Read more about email content development here. 

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Are You a Digital Entrepreneur?

 It’s been said that every entrepreneur is a digital entrepreneur.
This is right. This is wrong.
It’s right in the sense that all entrepreneurs are using digital technology to build, launch, and grow their businesses.
But it’s wrong in the sense that not all entrepreneurs are doing everything digitally — which is, amazingly, now possible to do. And it can create compelling career and lifestyle options in the process.
We just launched a new podcast, The Digital Entrepreneur, that discusses the specific strategies, concepts, and tactics necessary for pure digital entrepreneurs to thrive in today’s ever-evolving online marketplace.
Will entrepreneurs who use digital technology benefit from this show? Absolutely. Because the big ideas apply to all businesses in a digital world.
But we’re talking directly to the pure digital entrepreneur.
Is that you?
Brian Clark and I invite you to join this discussion, which you need to be a part of. 

Who is a digital entrepreneur?

Let’s get a little more specific here in how we define “digital entrepreneur” and the distinction between other types of entrepreneurs.
To do this, look no further than the home page for Digital Commerce Institute, the ultimate online home for digital entrepreneurs.
Digital entrepreneurs are entrepreneurs focused exclusively on digital commerce, and digital commerce is “a subset of e-commerce used to delineate companies that create digital products and services that are marketed, delivered, and supported completely online.”
Examples of digital commerce products include ebooks, online education, membership sites, downloadable software, web hosting, and software as a service (“SaaS”).
If you look at the history of Rainmaker Digital, we have created successful examples of each of those types of products. We are digital entrepreneurs in the purest sense of the term.
This is what qualifies us to define and champion the term, and to be the mentor for other digital entrepreneurs who want to create the digital business and lifestyle of their dreams — one built around digital goods and services.
We dig more into this idea of who is, and who isn’t, a digital entrepreneur in our first episode.
Listen: Who is a Digital Entrepreneur?
We also discuss how digital facilitators of offline services like AirBNB and Uber fit into this whole spectrum, and even how virtual reality might change everything in the future. 

What does a digital entrepreneur need to succeed?

If digital entrepreneurs are focusing on digital products and services that are marketed, delivered, and supported completely online, as we submit that they are, then it stands to reason a good website is a prerequisite for success.
There are five elements of the modern marketing website that all digital entrepreneurs need to be thinking about and implementing in a smart way.
Really, all entrepreneurs needs a website that incorporates these five elements.

1. Email (registration, not opt-in)
2. Adaptive content and responsive design
3. The access experience
4. Online courses as lead magnets
5. Testing … of everything

You’re fighting with one hand tied behind your back if you are not including all five elements as part of an adaptive experience that you deliver to your audience, your prospects, and your customers.
We discussed these five elements in our second episode of The Digital Entrepreneur, with individual breakdowns of each on the way.
Listen: The 5 Elements of the Modern Marketing Website

What can you learn from other successful digital entrepreneurs?

Plenty.
This is why we are going to feature regular interviews with digital entrepreneurs who are out there making big things happen.
Digital entrepreneurs like … Danny Margulies.
In our most recent episode, I interviewed Danny about his experience transitioning from a “soul-crushing” job into becoming a six-figure freelancer, and then how he leveraged that experience into building a powerhouse online course about freelancing that made over $25,000 in revenue in January of 2016.
It’s a great story — both for the human element and because of what you learn from Danny’s experience and insight.
Listen: Secrets of a Six-Figure Online Course Builder

Subscribe, and join us on this journey to better digital entrepreneurship

As I mention to Brian in the first episode, the name of the song we’re using for intro music is “Men on a Mission.”
It’s appropriate, because he and I are men on a mission to help digital entrepreneurs succeed — via smart and proven strategies, and by sharing the experiences and stories of others.
If you’re a current or aspiring digital entrepreneur, we hope you’ll make The Digital Entrepreneur a weekly appointment.

Subscribe to The Digital Entrepreneur on iTunes
(Or search “Digital Entrepreneur” in your podcast app of choice.)
Thanks … we’ll talk to you soon!

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Bot-to-bot marketing is coming soon. Are you ready?

Martech's future isn't only about bots and agents talking to consumers. Here's what it means when they start talking to other bots and agents.

Amazon Echo, housing the Alexa intelligent agent

In the past year or so, a new marketing channel has emerged around bots and intelligent agents.
This includes voice-based intelligent agents like Google Home’s Assistant or Amazon’s Alexa, and chatbots that interact largely through text conversations. Marketers are beginning to plan their conversational strategies and logic for this channel.
But another channel — maybe it should be considered a sub-channel — is about to emerge. It’s when the bot or agent, fulfilling the needs of the human user, is interacting with another bot or agent instead of searching the web, or a knowledge base, or a profile.
Just when you thought digital marketing strategy had reached its stasis, we may be in for another major reinvention.
In a few years, ArcTouch Chief Experience Officer and founder Adam Fingerman predicted, “most interaction will be conversational.” His company develops apps — and now bots — and he’s conducting a session on “Bot-to-Bot Marketing” at our MarTech Conference in May.
In a common scenario today, you might ask Google Home to find a hotel room under $450 in Chicago near the Loop.
Google Home searches the web, possibly including reviews on TripAdvisor.
To support this user-to-agent/bot interaction, Fingerman told me, “marketers will have to spend more time on reputation management” to ensure that what Google finds is generally good. Hopefully, that will translate into being one of the top results, since a voice-based agent is likely to return only a few.
He also suggested brands may need to provide more structured data — possibly in a specific industry-based taxonomy — that makes attributes more transparent so Google Home can do apples-to-apples comparisons about, say, hotel rooms.

The importance of loyalty

Another tilting factor can be loyalty points, which Fingerman said will become more important since you may direct Google Home to Hilton, where you’re a loyalty program member.
Eventually, Hilton will want to become more of an active player in this new kind of user interaction. It might pay for top placement when “find me a hotel in Chicago” comes up in a search by an agent or bot.
So far, these are fairly standard marketing tools — reputation management, positioning, loyalty programs, paid placement — in response to what is essentially a voice-controlled intelligent search engine.
But this can change when the bot/agent acts on your preferences, either stated by you or learned over time from the decisions you make.
That’s because the natural evolution of this preferences-based activity by a generalized bot/agent is a personal bot or agent that acts only on your behalf. Perhaps it can search for anything, or perhaps it specializes in hotel rooms. In that case, you might also have bots/agents for finding a great restaurant, or getting the best concert tickets, or whatever.
Analyst David Raab pointed out to me that, when you are represented by a personal agent/bot, “brands will have to speak to your preferences.”
But those aren’t necessarily the same kinds of preferences that, say, guide the personalization of web content when you visit a particular publisher’s site. Or that cause Netflix to show you more thrillers, because you watch so many of that movie genre.
It’s not yet clear exactly how your personal bots will express your preferences, except in their selection of products to recommend to you. Perhaps a preferences profile will be available from the bot.

Bot competition

At the very least, this means marketers’ systems will need to track what your bot(s) chooses, in addition to what you choose. This can lead to new kinds of targeting segmentation, where advertising or marketing systems are segmenting and targeting not just you, but your bots.
And it could be more complex than that, because it may not be entirely clear the extent to which your personal bot actually represents the entirety of your preferences.
As Raab told me via email:

Consumer-side bots will need to be trained. A bot might just listen to you order pizza a few times to get some idea of how you do it, and then take over, perhaps asking for coaching during future interactions if it’s not sure what you want. People will vary in how much control they’re willing to delegate, and those preferences might change from one day to the next.

You might have personal bots with different authorities to represent your different interests, just as you might have a separate real estate lawyer, a divorce lawyer and a tax lawyer. Or you might have a bot with a deeper understanding of what you like in shoes, compared to another one that only finds slippers for you.
For one thing, Raab noted, this could lead to a “competition among consumer-side bots,” where independent providers — incentivized by a percentage of sales — offer personal bots with differing intelligence levels or industry specialties.
Beyond the generalized intelligent agents/bots, and the personal agents/bots, it’s quite possible brands may develop their own. (Agents/bots might overlap with platform-specific applications like Amazon’s skills, which some brands have developed, but agents/bots can offer platform-independence and act as a general brand interface.)
Hilton’s bot might know how to match the attributes sought, how to offer the right kind of incentives, or even how to negotiate.
Brand bots “will need rules for how to interact with [either] people or bots,” Fingerman noted. Rules that don’t yet exist, and which may eventually have to conform with some middleware provided by Google, Amazon, Apple or others.

‘Digital Cohesion’

Inherent in all of this, both Raab and Fingerman point out, is a new incarnation of trust. It might simply be another form of brand trust — i.e., I trust Amazon and therefore I trust Alexa.
Or it might be earned trust, where you learn to trust a personal bot provided by a third party because it returns good choices, the way you might learn to trust Pandora’s taste in how it programs a thematic radio station.
Raab pointed out that all of this belongs to a broader vision of autonomous technology acting on our behalf, described as “Digital Cohesion” by network solution provider Juniper Networks.
In a white paper on the topic, the company broadly defines the term as:… a future in which applications connect and self-assemble to deliver compelling mega-services that enhance our lives.”
In one implementation, for instance, a system-wide intelligence monitors a diabetic man’s medical sensors and knows when to intervene and what services to call.
Implied in this vision, of course, is that bots and agents are talking to bots and agents.
So, it’s not just about finding the best nearby pizza. It could be almost every kind of consumer, health or business choice will be mediated by intelligent bots/agents, probably layers of them. Marketers are just beginning to get a sense of that emerging ecosystem.
And you thought the digital universe was settling down.


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Three Simple Guides to Trending Digital Strategies

In an ever-changing digital marketing market, success in business can sometimes depend on what you do or don’t do online. This article will share you some simple digital marketing guides.

1. Harness the Power of Digital

BE SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZED

Allow your customers to find your website with just a few keystrokes. With solid search engine optimization (SEO), your website will be discover-able, and you can even cut down on paid search engine marketing costs.

Follow our SEO topic and make do everything you need ASAP.

MAXIMIZE YOUR IMPACT ON MOBILE

The age of the desktop is quickly becoming a thing of the past. Our mobile devices have become our communications hub, our diary, our entertainment portal, our primary source of media consumption, our wallet, and our gateway to real-time information. Market accordingly.

To optimize your impact with mobile users, you should:

• Verify that your website and blog are responsive across all devices.
• Think about the mobile user’s journey and tailor a digital experience to match.
• Test your email templates across multiple devices to ensure your message is accessible by all mobile users.

Start with Sneeit responsive testing tool to verify the strength of your website.

GROW YOUR AUDIENCE WITH CONTENT

Content marketing is a powerful and effective way to reach your customers, and if done well, doubles as a retention tool. Use this simple, four-step exercise from digital marketing expert to get started:
1. What’s your end goal? For content marketing, this means a library of content that will attract new customers by reflecting your business’ authority and expertise.
2. What content do you already have at your disposal? Take stock of what you already have. Chances are, you’ve got a wealth of owned content to work with. Social posts to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram all count. Here are some places to start looking: Emails, blogs, videos, audio recordings, photographs, interviews, tech support logs and conversations, knowledge bases, product instructions, community forums. Now, develop categories of content, and organize your content within them to see what you really have.
3. What new content could you create? Now that you know what you already have, think about what’s missing. Some businesses naturally lend themselves to certain kinds of content. What types of content naturally suit your product or service? Where could you create content that would add value for your customer?
4. Where would you distribute the content? A distribution plan for your content is key to your success. Where would people be looking for content you produce? Social posts, blog exchanges, and email signatures are all places you should consider in your content distribution strategy. Get inspired, and learn best practices on content marketing: Watch this video!

AMPLIFY YOUR EVENTS, DIGITALLY

While this is a pro-digital guide, we never underestimate the power of in-person, event-based marketing. To ensure your events are a success, take advantage of these readily available digital tools:

• Use events organisation tools like EventBrite to organize, promote, manage, and track your events.
• Make your event sharable across channels. Promote via email marketing, by tweeting about it, and by posting it as an event on Facebook.
• Create a paid Facebook campaign to target an audience with an affinity toward the topic of your event.

Download the Event Planning 101 Toolkit.

SET UP ANALYTIC TOOLS TO MEASURE SUCCESS

The beauty of digital marketing is its ability to be measured. As such, the foundations of successful digital campaigns includes tools in place to measure, dissect, and analyse their results. Proper metrics will give you insight into the returns on your investments and help you make decisions about what to keep — and what to lose.
Luckily, channels such as search engines and social media platforms make it easy to set up small, low-risk experiments with immediate results.
Get started with these three steps for building an analytics toolkit.

2. Tools to Optimize Your Work

Now, let’s take a look at the tools that you should consider using to operate with top efficiency. Download / apply the below apps immediately to increase day to day productivity:

• Trello, a visual, cloud-based project management tool.
• Evernote, to organise your to-do lists and take notes and then access them from anywhere via mobile app, tablet, or desktop browser.
• Dropbox Business, for the convenience and mobility of collaborating on your files whenever and wherever.
• Slack, for real-time messaging between teams internally and externally to replace emails with live conversation.
• Sunrise Calendar, to keep all of your events and calendars in one place.
• Qwilr, so you can turn your documents into easily shareable web pages with the click of a button

3. Never Stop Learning

The above guides can help you for a while but the world of digital marketing is constantly changing. You’ll want to stay knowledgeable and ride the waves as they come.

HAVE A WORKING KNOWLEDGE OF FRONT-END WEB DEVELOPMENT

Your website is arguably one of your most important business assets. You don’t have to code on your own (although plenty of business owners do), but you should have a working knowledge of front-end web development so you can have meaningful conversations and make informed decisions with those who do handle your website.

KEEP UP WITH THE DIGITAL WORLD

Stay current with customers and employees who are increasingly plugged in.

• Register for a free Basic Account with PSFK, and gain access to innovation news from the worlds of advertising, design, tech, and retail.
• Subscribe the Sneeit blog for your daily dose of marketing tips.
• Sign up for Panda, a news-feed dashboard for designers, developers, and entrepreneurs.
• Start using Medium, a place to read, write, and interact with the stories that matter most to you.

KEEP TABS ON CURRENT YEAR HOT EVENT TECH TRENDS

Every year technology continues to improve, bringing along benefits for businesses and event organizers. Staying on top of it all can be overwhelming at times, so check a shortlist of the hottest technology trends to spice up your events this year

Mobile, Mobile, Mobile: A must for every business

It’s the year of mobile, again. This Nielsen Mobile Ratings Report revealed that more than 15 million Australians own smartphones, along with some 12 million owning a tablet device. Plus, more and more millennials are relying on their mobile as their primary access to the internet. If your event team isn’t yet harnessing the power of mobile check-ins and ticket scanning, check out Eventbrite Neon to turn your iOS device into a mobile box office.

To Do: Download Eventbrite Neon to get your event mobile-ready.

Periscope: If you are dabbling in video content marketing

With the emergence of new apps that enable instant broadcasting, video and live streaming is going from strength to strength. Linked to a Twitter account, Periscope is quickly gaining traction thanks to its live streaming capabilities. Event organisers and attendees themselves are now broadcasting live video of events and experiences to engage with their audience anywhere in the world.

To Do: Download Periscope, and start broadcasting some fun summer activities to practice.

Snapchat: For that millennial audience

Popular with the millennials, many people initially passed Snapchat off as immature and frivolous, but it’s a platform worth keeping an eye on. In fact, e-commerce giant Alibaba invested $200 million in Snapchat (in 2015), signaling that we can expect growth from this platform.

With the introduction of ‘Live Stories’ — a feature that generates user content at a live experience — Snapchat is increasing its focus on live event and location-based coverage, which will allow designers and brands to create unique imagery for users to overlay on their images based on their location.

To Do: Download Snapchat and familiarize yourself with Live Stories.

RFID Technology: To surprise and delight at large-scale events

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a small electronic device that provides a unique identifier for that tag. RFID wristband technology is already in use at some major music festivals and large public events to monitor foot traffic, prevent ticket fraud, and even enhance attendee experiences with the inclusion of cashless payments and social media integration. RFID technology is set to become more accessible to SMEs. You can read more about RFID technology here.

Proximity Marketing & ‘Geo-Fencing’: To Enhance Event Experiences

Beacon is a location-based technology which can emit a low-energy signal that can push instant messages to a dedicated app. Once a person with the app installed on their phone enters the designated zone (known as a Geo-fence), a message will appear on their phone. When placed around a venue, these devices can do everything from track attendee behavior and foot traffic, to pushing notifications such as greeting attendees to check-in or displaying promotional offers.

Different messages can be sent depending on the physical location of the user. Examples of this location-based technology include audio tours, retail offers, and even scavenger hunts.

The Melbourne digital event Pause Fest recently used Beacon technology to improve its event management and reporting. Check out the case study here.

To do: Read up on Beacons and how they could change your on-site event marketing

 

Tell us how do you feel about this in the comments. If you find this useful share it with your friends and whoever could be interested.

 

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